Writers have two lives. One where you can run into them, alive, in the street, or where you might catch a glimpse of their ghost in the house where they were born or died. The other in their books, where, without a body, but not without a voice, they tell you who they were. They have both a perishable flesh-and-blood body and a no-less mortal paper one. The second life sometimes lasts longer than the first, but neither one is more real than the other. Which one is the writer, the one who lives in the world, or the one who writes from his or her life like no one else could have?

With this anthology of his literary essays published in various journals over the past thirty years, Michel Schneider draws our attention to the dual lives of writers: Flaubert, Baudelaire, Musil, Canetti, Kafka, Henry James, Melville, Colette, Malraux, Starobinski. And behind the scenes, Proust, of course, the ghost who haunts Schneider’s life every day, and about whom he has already written two full books. All these writers had to face the same dilemma: should they write or should they live?

Coming alive only outside of life, feeling at home only outside of oneself, such was the fate of the writers that the literary essays gathered in this volume bring back to life. For some authors, writing isn’t the same as living; for others, it’s reliving a second time. Writers are like ghosts. They come from the past – their own as well as ours. Their being is only their shadow. Their home, the nowhere of language. Their time, the past continuous.

An anthology of literary essays published in various journals over the past thirty years, in which Michel Schneider focuses on the double lives of writers: Flaubert, Baudelaire, Musil, Canetti, Kafka, Henry James, Melville, Colette, Malraux, Starobinski.